Shargin photographs North America -- why?

"Jim Oberg" wrote in message ...
From ISS On-Orbit Status, October 17: "Yuri Shargin used the Nikon D1 camera
with f800 lens on his first session of observation and imaging of selected
targets for the Russian Environmental Protection Service as part of the Ekon
(KPT-3) experiment, today performing photography of the North American
continent."


Did we ever find out what the list of photo targets was, and how far
off track they were?

This bears on the "what would they see with that kind of lens" issue,
and weather these were detailed verticals or if they were oblique
angles for relief (elevation) spotting.

/dps

Jim,
All Russian pic's that are digital are downlinked to the ground via the
USOS Ku-Band system to MCC-H. The images are then sent to MCC-M. No need for
spy theories.


"Jim Oberg" wrote in message
...
From ISS On-Orbit Status, October 17: "Yuri Shargin used the Nikon D1
camera
with f800 lens on his first session of observation and imaging of selected
targets for the Russian Environmental Protection Service as part of the
Ekon
(KPT-3) experiment, today performing photography of the North American
continent."


Uh, my awkward question is this: what interest does a Russian
environmental
protection experiment have in high-res surface imaging of North America
(read: United States)? Since it's a Russian experiment, I presume this
means
that NASA will never see the images. Does this activity possibly have
anything to do with the recent severe shortage of Russian military
reconnaissance capability (nine months without ANY reccesat in orbit, just
recently alleviated)? I could be totally over-reacting here -- after all,
Anatoliy Perminov, head of Russia's Federal Space Agency, promised that
Shargin would not be doing any military-related activities on ISS, and
since
Perminov was until recently Shargin's boss (he's the former head of the
Russian 'Space Forces', and a military officer himself), this also
provides
a certain level of credibility to the assertion.